Zeebrugge Brexit Worry. Moon and Mars rock. Museum Crash. Spotting Draconid Meteors

30 minutes of night sky looking for Draconid meteors. Star Wheel, three plane tracks and one clearly visible short meteor track

Prime Minister May is still in post but receives another blow, with Chancellor Merkel and President Macron confirming that there will be no progress on Brexit until the UK's financial offer to the EU is made clear. A hard Brexit will have an impact on the Belgian port of Zeebrugge, which  deals with  64 container ships and ferries carrying goods bound for our markets, entering at Tilbury, Tyne, Sheerness, Southampton and other UK ports. So the chaos could develop on either side of the border with the EU, if tarifs and additional processing time and paperwork slow down transit.

I set off for London at the ungodly hour of 7 am, catching an empty number 2 to Cambridge North and then the train to London, via a change at Cambridge. On the fast train, had a very interesting conversation with Dr Ron Jortner, Managing Director of Masthead Biosciences, whose company provides consultancy and advice to bioscience companies. We had a shared interest in imaging and Ron introduced me to two photon fluorescence microscopy. Fluorescent labelled materials are designed such that they have to be excited by two photons of a long wavelength light, so that they emit a higher energy/smaller wavelength photon. The advantage of the method is that you can actually visualise material that is embedded up to several hundreds of microns within tissue.

I managed to get bench with wall space for my two exhibits on arrival at the Natural History Museum. One was  on the Quekett Spotted Wing Drosophila Survey initiated last year and now going global in iNaturalist. The other was a demonstration of stereoimages. We had visiting experts from Belgium and the Netherlands giving talks supported by some excellent videos of microscopic life. The most interesting exhibits for me were the samples of moon rock and a martian meteorite, as well as a medal commemoration Apollo 13, which contained some trace of the metal from the rocket that had gone around behind the moon and returned to Earth despite an explosion on board. The same exhibitor also had plastic casts of real Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor claws.

Certificates were given for best slide made, for artwork based on microscopy and for photographs through the microscope. I had three images entered and was delighted to receive my certificate.

Coming out of the last lecture of the day and returning to the exhibition area, smartphones began to buzz with messages of concern from friends or relatives back home. The area outside the Natural Mistory Museum Exhibition Road entrance (which we were on) had been cordoned off and cleared. Armed police and ambulances were active outside. Some idiot had driven their car into the crowd outside the museum, injuring 11 people. Although 9 were taken to hospital, the injuries were not life threatening.

The driver of the black minicab that caused the incident had been dragged out of the car and wrestled to the ground till the police came to arrest him. The fast and heavy response was obviously based on past experience, where the tactic of driving into crowds was used a a deliberate terrorist attack of soft targets. By the time we were aware of the incident,a couple of hours after it occurred at around 2:30 pm, the police were beginning to think that it might simply be a traffic accident. However, the tube stations and South Kensington and Gloucester Road were closed and evacuated as a precaution and we could not use the Exhibition Road or the main Cromwell Road entrance to exit. We wandered through the museum to the far end for the Queen's Gate exit. I walked up towards Hyde Park and then along Kensington road towards Kensington tube station. Somewhat optimistically, I caught a bus but got off one stop later as the traffic was practically at a standstill as the police helicopter still circled ahead. I beat the bus to the Kensington station.

Arrived back home 12 hours after having left.

The Draconid meteor shower was expected this weekend. It is know to be very variable, some years providing a spectacular burst of meteors, others it is relatively quiet. We had a clear sky for just over an hour so I set up the the camera to take five second exposures of the night time sky facing North at 6 second intervals. Whilst I let the camera run for over an hour, only the first half hour gave clear pictures as condensation formed on the lens after that. The 300 images were stacked using the freeware Picolay as a trial. The resultant star wheel around the pole star also showed three plane tracks and at least one short meteor trace. Looking at the resultant stack in closer detail, there were two further very faint faint traces. Nothing really spectacular though.